The entrance is located behind a large
painting of a Fat Lady in a pink silk dress.
If you know the right password
to tell her, she swings open to reveal a round opening in the wall. The
common room contains a lot of squashy armchairs, a fireplace, and tables.
The fireplace is connected to the
Floo Network, but as it is
extremely public except in the dead of night, Gryffindors usually use
owls to communicate with their
families instead. There's also a
notice board,
for public announcements such as the date of the next
Hogsmeade weekend,
but also for notices from individual students seeking to buy or sell
secondhand books, or trade
Chocolate Frog cards, or
similar, as in any school.

There are two staircases opening off the common room into the Tower itself:
the boys' staircase, on which the seven boys' dormitories are located (one
for each year) and the girls' staircase, on which the seven girls'
dormitories are located (one for each year). The girls' staircase is
under a spell so that if a boy sets foot on it and persists for a
few steps, a wailing klaxon goes off and the staircase temporarily
Transfigures itself into a
stone slide, sending him and anyone else on the stairs sailing to the bottom. According to
Hogwarts: A History,
the founders believed that girls
were more trustworthy than boys, so that while the girls' staircase is
enchanted to prevent boys from getting in, the boys' staircase does not carry
a reciprocal enchantment
(OP17).
Each dormitory
is a round room with windows looking out onto the
grounds, and containing
four-poster beds.

Known Gryffindors, past and present
For each known Gryffindor below, his or her name is given together with the
years he or she was a student in Gryffindor. See the individual students'
entries for more information (such as the references for how we know that
they're Gryffindors and what years they were in).

Then Lupin calls it back before
Harry has to deal with it, and sends
it to Neville to finish it off.
Harry and
Hermione didn't have to
work with it, because they answered the questions correctly at the beginning
of the class.

Now we know that Lavender was
one of those unidentifed students. We also know that there are definitely
only five boys in Harry's dorm room,
so that's how I knew that the two remaining students were girls.

Ta-da!

EDITOR'S NOTE:
This isn't conclusive proof of anything, of course, but it's a nice bit of
deduction and just might turn out to be true! Another perfectly reasonable
explanation, of course, is that the
boggart
was getting confused and was changing form at random.
-- Steve Vander Ark

A suggestive bit of evidence against this theory is that every known
Gryffindor - all three girls and eventually all five boys - belonged to the
D.A., as well as the entire
Gryffindor Quidditch team,
every non-Slytherin prefect in
Hermione's and
Ron's year, and even including the
close friends of various members' current boyfriends and girlfriends.
Everybody, in other words, who was thought to be a likely candidate for
membership, and we know all the members - and no extra Gryffindor girls
are among them. -- MLW